The present invention relates to a hard disk driver state detection method, and more particularly to an efficient and economic method of detecting every state of a hard disk driver.
When a hard disk is installed in a computer system, the driver of the hard disk must be well detected. According to the most commonly used hard disk driver state detection method (SCSI accessed fault-tolerant enclosures), the hard disk is connected to a SCSI (small computer system interface) card, and four of the 68 pins of the SCSI card are used as fault bus. By means of scanning the signal on the fault bus, the hot swap operation of the hard disk driver is judged, and the install, active, or fault operation state of the hard disk driver is indicated. The installed hard disk can be operated normally only when fault detection is done. Because this method uses the signal from the assigned four pins of the SCSI card for state judgment, it cannot achieve a complete fault detection on all functions of the hard disk. Further, the hard disk driver, which is connected to the SCSI card for detection, must be equipped with a decoder to identify messages transmitted from the controller of the SCSI card. The installation of the decoder greatly increases the cost of the hard disk driver. Further, because the fault bus defined by the assigned four pins of the SCSI card simply detects part of the functions of the hard disk driver, it is unable to know data access of the SCSI card to the hard disk driver and the operation condition of the hard disk driver. Further, using the assigned four pins as a fault bus affects the quality of signal transmission of the SCSI bus. Because of the aforesaid reasons, a hard disk failure may occur after the computer system has been delivered to the distributor or consumer.
The present invention has been accomplished to provide a hard disk driver state detection method, which eliminates the aforesaid drawbacks. It is one object of the present invention to provide a hard disk driver state detection method, which greatly simplifies the detection procedure. It is another object of the present invention to provide a hard disk driver state detection method, which greatly reduces hard disk driver state detection cost. According to one aspect of the present invention, a computer system detection main unit is used to detect a number of hard disks being connected to a SCSI (small computer system interface) card. The computer system detection main unit reads signals from the hard disks by scanning an inter-integrated circuit of a SCSI bus of the SCSI card, and judges the state of the hard disks subject to the nature of signal received, and then turns on respective indicator lights on the SCSI card indicative of the state of the hard disks. This method eliminates the installation of a decoder in each hard disk. According to another aspect of the present invention, the processor of the SCSI card detects install and active states of the hard disks and data access mode of the SCSI card by scanning signals on three pins of a SCA2 (single connector attach2) connected to the SCSI card.